Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Long time...no post

I've been neglecting this blog for awhile now. So time for an update. It's been a busy past few months. In that time, I've had the privilege to photograph a couple weddings. Ebel Creative is always seeking new challenges,and opportunities. Weddings are certainly a challenge since there are  no reshoots! Feel free to check out the website for some wedding photography portfolio shots.

In addition to weddings, there are are also a lot of other "back burner"projects going on at ECD right now. I will be sharing those as they become more developed.

That's what's happening at ECD...what's new with you?

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Fresco Restoration Gone Wrong...The Result: "Monkey Jesus"

Interesting, and semi-amusing news story from ABC News:

Elderly Woman Ruins 19th Century 

Fresco in Restoration Attempt


(Centro de Estudios Borjanos)
  

    It's one thing to stage a do-it-yourself renovation on a table, mirror or painting found deep in the weeds of a yard sale.
    It's quite another to attempt a repair job on a one-of-a-kind 19th century fresco by the Spanish painter Elias Garcia Martinez with a few broad brushstrokes.
    Such was the lesson learned by an elderly member of the Santuario de Misericodia church in Borja, in northeastern Spain. Her handiwork, or lack thereof, was discovered after the painter's granddaughter donated the work, "Ecce Homo," to the archive of religious paintings housed at the Centro de Estudios Borjano, also in Borja.
    When officials from the center went to examine the work at the church a few weeks ago, they found it was not as Martinez had left it, the U.K.'s Telegraph reported.
    The last photo taken of the artwork before any damage was done, in 2010, showed Martinez's intricate brush strokes around the face of Jesus. A photo taken in July by center officials for a catalog of regional religious art showed the painting splattered by white marks, possibly the work of the woman trying to remove paint. The final photo, taken this month after Martinez's relative donated the work, showed broad and thick layers of paint now covering important details in the work, such as the crown of thorns on Jesus' head.
    While not a good day for art historians, local officials said the restoration attempt by the woman, said to be in her 80s, was not malicious, just misguided.
    Juan Maria Ojeda, the city councilor in charge of cultural affairs, told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the woman turned herself in and admitted causing the damage when she realized it had "gotten out of hand." He added that the woman, who was not identified, attempted to restore the work with "with good intentions."
    The U.K.'s Independent reported the church and center are now trying to assess the damage to the painting and determine whether a professional can restore Martinez's work. Ojeda added that the woman herself would meet with restorers to explain what kind of materials she used to help them undo the damage.
There was no figure given on the value of the work, said to hold more sentimental than artistic value because Martinez's family is known in the local community.

Link to article (there's also a video): http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/elderly-woman-ruins-19th-century-fresco-restoration-attempt-191155838--abc-news-topstories.html

Guy turns the botched artwork into "Ruined Spanish Fresco, Monkey Jesus" costume: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/ruined-spanish-fresco-monkey-jesus-costume-makes-rounds-133638338.html

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Presidential Design



    In interest of the debate tonight. I thought I would take a minute to see how each candidate fares in terms of branding and the impact of their campaign visuals. Just to be clear, I am not endorsing either candidate from a political standpoint. I am simply offering my observations on each candidates visual aids and branding.
    From a Graphic Design standpoint, President Obama wins in a landslide. The posters above demonstrate a clear and consistent branding. I think what I like most about these posters is they avoid the campaign cliches. By that I mean, there are no cheesy slogans, and while stars and stripes are patriotic, I don't need to be beaten over the head with them. I also like the use of a neutral, somewhat "earthy" color palette. The posters also convey a message about what the candidate stands for without screaming "Vote for me!" I see a person, not a politician. There is sense of trust worthyness portrayed.


Going back to the election of 2008, Obama and his team understand the power of a brand and the impact of a good visual image. His "Change" posters (left) became almost iconic. His "O" logo also became very recognizable. This particular poster is a bold approach we had not seen before in a presidential campaign.

Governor Romney's posters are very traditional, utilizing the standard red,white and blue color palette. On one hand I guess you could argue that they convey a sense of stability. On the other hand, they are a good example of the "cliche" poster I mentioned. Romney's design team was afraid to take any risks, and consequently the result is a poster I've seen 100 times before.

In contrast to Obama's poster series above, in this image I see a politician first and fore most. I find it much harder to relate to the candidate on a personal level. The ad also does not tell me anything about the candidate and why I should trust him with my vote. Maybe it is just because the straight on portrait and the waving flag background have been so over used in the past.



This is another nice example of a well put together ad. There is a nice use of typography and the composition is nicely balanced.

This ad was not created by Romney's official campaign, It is a graphic I found on facebook created by one of his supporters. There is a stark contrast in style between the two ads. I'm not going to say that this one is ineffective, but it seems slightly amateurish to me. I will give Romeny credit, his "Romney: Believe in America" logo is nicely done.


So, as a voter, I remain undecided. As a Graphic Designer, the choice is clear, Obama wins the branding campiagn in a landslide.


Monday, October 1, 2012

Creative Quotes, Part 1

These are some of my favorite quotes about creativity and the creative process:
For more quotes, visit: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/creativity?page=2


“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.” 
― Hugh MacLeodIgnore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity


“Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” 
― Albert Einstein

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. ” 
― Pablo PicassoPablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form : Graphic Works, 1895-1972

“Creativity takes courage. ” 
― Henri Matisse

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun” 
― Pablo Picasso

“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” 
― Pablo Picasso

“You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” 
 Albert Einstein

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” 
― Scott Adams

“life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one” 
― Stella Adler

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” 
― Antoine de Saint-ExupéryThe Little Prince

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” 
― Sylvia PlathThe Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” 
― Erich Fromm

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.” 
― Pablo Picasso

“If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” 
― Ken RobinsonThe Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. ” 
― Ernest Hemingway

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” 
― George Bernard Shaw

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” 
― Osho

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.” 
― Steve MartinBorn Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions” 
― Leonardo da Vinci

“When I am ..... completely myself, entirely alone... or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.” 
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Creativity is as important as literacy” 
― Ken Robinson

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.” 
― AberjhaniEncyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

“Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make them real. ” 
― Robert Fanney



I am always looking for new quotes, keep checking back for more!


Many of the quotes above are from Pablo Picasso, a truly innovative artist. Check out https://www.artsy.net/artist/pablo-picasso to learn more about Picasso and his work.





The Creative Personality

Five Paradoxical Traits of the Creative Personality
By: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi


    Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.

    Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us different from apes--our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology--is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.

    When we're creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes dose to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy--even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace--provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

    I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

    Here are the 5 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

    1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.

    This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always "on." In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.

    One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.

    2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the "g factor," meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.

    The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity

    Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

    Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.

    Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.

    Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.

    3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.

    Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: "Tell anybody you're a sculptor and they'll say, 'Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.' And I tend to say, 'What's so wonderful?' It's like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don't wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn't fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?"

    Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: "When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, 'My God, it's not working,' and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence."

    Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while his wife called him back to bed with no success.

    4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality At the same time, this "escape" is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

    Most of us assume that artists--musicians, writers, poets, painters--are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

    5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

Hello!

Let's face it, Social Media is not going away. So in an effort to increase my networking options. I have finally started a Blogger account. Hopefully through this media I am able to connect with other creative personalities who share the same interests as I do. You can never have enough networking outlets. So if you are reading this, feel free to reach out and leave a comment. You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Behance.com, Glossom.com, and Myfolio.com